Chemist nudges Cape students towards science

Dennis-Yarmouth High School students were treated to a visit today from a passionate Nobel laureate who hopes to inspire young students to become scientists.

KAREN JEFFREY

SOUTH YARMOUTH - During his first year of college at Stanford University, Dudley R. Herschbach fell in love with history.

“It opened my mind to new perspectives, changed the way I looked at people, institutions and the world,” the Nobel Prize winning Harvard professor told students at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School today. His love of history also fueled a life-long love affair with studying Benjamin Franklin.

Not exactly the subject one might expect to discuss with the man who, 23 years ago, shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work using techniques from elementary particle physics to study how molecules behave in chemical reactions. His co-winners were Yuan T. Lee of the University of California at Berkeley and John C. Polanyi of the University of Toronto.

But then, one might also not expect a scientist to question high school students about Harry Potter books or to recommend they read the speech that author J.K. Rowling made at Harvard last year. Yet that’s exactly what Herschbach did yesterday at D-Y.

Herschbach has a mind unbound by convention. He exhibits an infectious enthusiasm and curiosity about the world.

Today, he unleashed all of those qualities, along with an abundance of gentle humor, on science students during a visit that is part of a newly organized program aimed at bringing Nobel Prize winning scientists into classrooms. D-Y became the first high school in the country to participate, thanks to science faculty at their school who heard about the program and pursued a visit.

“Our goal is to grow Nobel Prize winners,” said Edward K. Shapiro, a patent-holding scientist who began the program through NL Translation, a nonprofit group in Lexington. “We want students to meet scientists, and hopefully be inspired.”

Herschbach said his fascination in science was prompted by an article on astronomy published in National Geographic when he was a child.

He showed students an original edition of the magazine carrying the story that inspired him so many years ago.

He also said that the research leading to the Nobel Prize began when he was a student and started thinking about an off-hand comment a teacher made about interactions of molecules.

The more he thought about interactions, the more curious he became. It is that kind of curiosity that he hopes students will discover, he said.

“If you have the capacity to fall in love with some question, some idea .... If you have a chance for that experience, you’ll have something better than a Nobel Prize,” he said.